On Mon, 01 Nov 2010 17:56:06 -0400, 98 Guy wrote:

Your computer's clock is off by an hour, btw.

legg wrote:

I have the W98 2ed normally in primary master, the W2K SP4 in
primary slave positions. Optical and bulk data on the secondary
IDE.

The 80G drives are WD WD800JB-00JJC0 ca 2006
The new drives are WD WD1600AAJB-00PVA0 ca 2008

As suggested by Mr.Blanton and recently noted to him, the new
drives will boot if the primary slave position is vacant.

So you are replacing two 80-gb drives with two 160-gb drives - yes?

Both connected on the same ribbon cable to the motherboard primary IDE
connector?

And the motherboard won't boot with that setup?

Boot a DOS floppy with fdisk and run fdisk and choose option (5) to see
what drive choices it presents to you. Then choose option (4) and check
to see that there is at least one partition or volume on the desired
boot drive that is marked with "A" under the Status column. "A" means
"Active", as in it's a bootable partition or volume.

If you can't boot a DOS floppy with both 160 gb drives connected as
master/slave, then move one of the drives to the second IDE interface
and try again.

I have used MANY of the 80-gb Western Digital drives, and quite a few of
the 320 gb drives, but I don't think I've ever had my hands on the 160
gb versions. I have a few Seagate 160 gb drives - but they're SATA.

I stuck the 'new' W98 Hdd in sec slave, as suggested, with the source
w98 hdd in primary master, and w2K in primary slave and booted up into
the usual W2K alt OS. W2K disc management shows the old W98 as H:,
healthy and boot; the new drive as C:, healthy and active.

Swap around their positions, as WDLG intended, and there's no boot.
Should be able to do something with the W2K recovery console, if I can
only figure out what that is.

RL